I kinda had to pick this assignment because I love minimalism AND book covers. I loved playing with white space on this cover and I wanted it to feel like a bug was crawling over the surface. I like the juxtaposition of the cleanliness of the white space with the neat text and then the creepy-crawly bug in the lower right-hand corner. If you don’t know why I would put a cockroach on the cover, then I might have to spoil the plot of this novel for you.

One of Kafka’s most popular books, The Metamorphosis tells the tale of a young man who wakes up in his bed as an insect. Though he never names the insect, it is generally agreed that he is describing a cockroach. The man cannot go to work and his family members are horrified by his transformation. Over the course of the novel, the man deteriorates both physically and mentally, as his family members begin to despise his dependency on them. I mean can you blame him? He’s a huge cockroach! He dies in the end and it serves as a moral for how much work and ability to make money factors into a human’s worth. In Kafka’s surreal society, if you can’t work then you can’t be a human being! I chose this book because it is a work that I’m always going back to. I have yet to read another book that has the same initial shock value. I loved to play with this image of the cockroach.

This assignment was nice because it allowed me to play with negative space and generating an overall feeling with my design. I wanted the viewer to feel like the bug was crawling over the book cover and was about to land on their hand. I actually worked this out pretty quickly and I used GIMP to do the whole thing so I’m getting better with it. Also, for the image of the cockroach I used freeimages.com again. It’s a really handy website because I don’t have to worry about running into any copyright issues with my projects!

Assignment Rating:

This assignment was to create a book cover using minimalist design/iconography, I chose a book on the Trojan war. The iconic image to help show the least amount was the Trojan horse, every kid learns of this. It has integrated  not only into some of our phrases but also is a very big battle told by historians. I have always loved this battle, for the fighting, the gods, and the intelligence that the story shows. The creation of the assignments was relatively easy, I needed only one image, which is the Trojan horse in the photo. To make a book cover i need to make the background of the horse transparent, I used make alpha. Then I had to think of a title, A War of Empires sounded good and got the point across if it hadn’t already that the book was about a war between the city of Troy and the Greeks.

Design Assignment:

Minimalist Book Covers 3.5?

For this assignment we had to make a minimalist book cover for a story. I used our radio show story and turned it into a book.

After the whole Gambino scandal an author by the name of K. L. Carter approached the tune squad and asked if he could write about all that had happened. Of course Longs was in on it from the beginning. He was already thinking about the amount of chicken parmesan he could by with all the money the book would bring in.  Cunningham was skeptical at first. Being in the FBI he didn’t want his name out there too much. There were too many crazies in this world, and he had locked a lot of them up. When Carter promised he wouldn’t use anyone’s real name, Cunningham came around. Callaghan didn’t care either way. She thought it would be cool to have one of her cases published, especially the Gambino case, but she left it up to the rest of the team to decide yay or nay on the book.

In the end K. L. Carter published a great, if not slightly less crazy, version of the Tune Squad’s fight against Gambino.

For this assignment I used paint. I found the silhouette figures on Google. I then added a text box to the top of the picture and wrote out the author’s name and the title of the book. I saved the picture and uploaded it to Flickr. Then I embedded it into this post.

I couldn’t resist creating a cover for my all time favorite novel, The Great Gatsby. I gathered inspiration from the various covers out there and decided on recreating Doctor Eckleburg. He is the derelict billboard that looms over the Valley of Ash between West and East Egg. Only a pair of spectacles and eyes, he stands out throughout the novel. He symbolizes God’s eyes and his ever all knowing mannerism. Eckleburg watches all that happens in the Valley of Ash, silently judging the inhabitants and their sinful actions. I could talk about this book for ages.

I found this assignment to be the most difficult of the creative designs so far. I figured out pretty quickly that I wanted to do Call of the Wild by Jack London and thought a wolf silhouette would be a great image to start out with. I then did a Google image search for a winter silhouette and found a great one from fotalia.com. As I’ve mentioned before this is my first time really getting involved with photoshop techniques so it took me a while to figure how to properly size the image, then cut and paste it. It’s rather simple using the marquee tool and free transform option to move an item from one picture to the other. Another task that took a bit of time was finding a font that I thought fit the image properly. I settled on the Papryus style which seems to fit the bill.

In the end, I quite enjoy the final outcome. I think the black and white imagery fits the winter landscape which the book is set in provides the clean minimalist appeal that I was looking for.

Assignment Link – 3.5 Stars

If you have no read The Giver by Lois Lowry I suggest you stop reading, get into your car, drive over to Barnes and Noble, and purchase yourself a copy. Even if you never return to this post, you will thank me later. I guarantee it.

If you have ready The Giver, thank I hope you can appreciate this assignment. For my first Visual Assignment of the week, I chose to create a minimalist book cover. Here is my final product:

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the plot, because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone nor is that what this assignment is about. But for me, a very powerful portion of the book is when Jonas learns what colors are, and is taught to see, name, and appreciate them. Of all the aspects of their society, the fact that they have removed an individual’s ability is what hit my the hardest. There was such a commitment to squash out individuality that a world of grays, blacks, and whites became all that was allowed. For Jonas to see the color red in the apple was a startling conviction humans are not meant to be controlled as they were in the community. This book cover shows the red of an apple, the first color that Jonas could see, in the black and white world that he grew up in.

To create this assignment I first took a picture of an apple on my windowsill: 

I then opened it in an app called “Photo Editor-”, which is free in the app store on an iPhone. I selected the “Splash” options, which allows someone to highlight certain colors or areas of a picture while leaving the rest of it black and white. I chose to use “Smart Color” as opposed to “Free Color”, because that tool focuses on only one color: 

After finishing the color I went to the “Text” box in order to  insert the title and author’s name:

So simple!